A short life of the author
Albert Schweitzer lived one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century — a life that would be implausible as fiction. He was, at various times and often simultaneously, a concert organist of international reputation, the author of the definitive study of J. S. Bach, a revolutionary New Testament scholar whose Quest of the Historical Jesus transformed biblical criticism, a philosopher who developed the ethical principle of “Reverence for Life,” a physician who founded and ran a hospital in the jungle of French Equatorial Africa for over fifty years, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. No other figure of the modern era achieved distinction at the highest level in so many unrelated fields.
Alsace
Albert Schweitzer was born in 1875 in Kaysersberg, Alsace — a province that had been German since 1871 and would become French again in 1918, giving Schweitzer a dual cultural identity that shaped his entire career. He grew up in Günsbach, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and showed extraordinary abilities from childhood: by nine, he was substituting for the church organist; by eighteen, he was studying theology, philosophy, and music at the University of Strasbourg.
He obtained doctorates in both philosophy and theology, studied organ with Charles-Marie Widor in Paris, and appeared to be destined for a brilliant academic and musical career in Europe. Then, at the age of thirty, he made a decision that astonished everyone who knew him.
The Decision
In 1905, Schweitzer announced that he would study medicine and then go to Africa to serve as a doctor. His friends thought he was mad. He had already published two major academic works — The Mystery of the Kingdom of God (1901) and his Bach study (1905) — and was the principal of the Theological College of St Thomas in Strasbourg. He gave up all of it, spent seven years studying medicine, and in 1913 sailed with his wife Hélène to Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon), where he established a hospital.
The hospital at Lambaréné became the most famous medical mission in the world. Schweitzer ran it for over fifty years, building it from a converted chicken coop into a complex that treated thousands of patients annually. He funded it through his European concert tours, his royalties, and donations from admirers worldwide.
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906), published in English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910), was Schweitzer’s most important scholarly work — a survey and critique of over a century of attempts by German theologians to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus. Schweitzer’s conclusion was devastating: the liberal Protestant scholars who had tried to recover a “historical” Jesus behind the theological Christ of the Gospels had succeeded only in creating Jesus in their own image. The real Jesus, Schweitzer argued, was an apocalyptic prophet who believed the world was about to end — a figure utterly alien to modern sensibility.
The book transformed New Testament scholarship. Its insistence that Jesus must be understood within his own apocalyptic Jewish context rather than domesticated into a modern liberal teacher remains the foundation of serious biblical criticism.
J. S. Bach
J. S. Bach (1905 in French, 1908 in German, 1911 in English) was Schweitzer’s study of the composer — a work that argued that Bach’s music was not abstract but deeply pictorial and theological, that the chorales were the key to understanding the instrumental works, and that performance practice must be informed by the rhetorical traditions of Bach’s own period. The book revolutionised Bach interpretation and remains essential reading for musicians.
The Philosophy of Civilisation
The Philosophy of Civilization (2 volumes, 1923) was Schweitzer’s attempt to develop a comprehensive ethical philosophy. The centrepiece was the concept of “Reverence for Life” (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben) — the idea that all ethics must begin with the recognition that every living being has a will to live and that the fundamental ethical act is the affirmation of life in all its forms. The concept influenced the environmental and animal rights movements of the later twentieth century and anticipated the bioethics movement by half a century.
The Critique: Paternalism and the Colonial Question
Schweitzer’s reputation has been subject to significant revision since his death. Critics — particularly African intellectuals and postcolonial scholars — have questioned the paternalistic assumptions underlying his work at Lambaréné. He ran the hospital on his own terms, resisting modernisation, maintaining what visitors described as chaotic and unsanitary conditions, and adopting a manner toward his African patients and staff that even sympathetic observers found condescending. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe used Schweitzer as an example of the benevolent racism embedded in European humanitarianism — a man who genuinely cared about Africans but could not conceive of them as equals. His famous remark, “The African is indeed my brother — but my younger brother,” encapsulates the problem.
These criticisms are legitimate and important, but they do not erase the substance of Schweitzer’s achievement. The hospital treated real patients; the theological and musicological scholarship retains its authority; the ethical philosophy, whatever its limitations in application, posed questions that remain central to environmental and animal ethics. Schweitzer is best understood as a figure who embodied both the highest aspirations and the deepest blind spots of European humanist culture — and whose contradictions are therefore instructive rather than simply damning.
Collecting Schweitzer
The Quest of the Historical Jesus (A. & C. Black, 1910, first English edition) is the primary scholarly target. J. S. Bach (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1908, German first) is collected by musicologists. Out of My Life and Thought (Henry Holt, 1933, English edition of Aus meinem Leben und Denken) is the most accessible autobiography. Signed copies and letters are available — Schweitzer maintained an enormous correspondence — and are collected for their association with one of the most celebrated humanitarian figures of the century.